January 15, 2018

On Monday 22 January 2018, there will be a new version of FASER released to all staff and students.

FASER originally started life as a project in Computer Science and Electronic Engineering (CSEE). When it was adopted by IT Services in 2005/6, FASER had roughly 5,000 submissions per academic year. With ongoing increases each year, 2015/16 saw nearly 150,000 student submissions in addition to 120,000 items of feedback, which is over 50 times the number of items FASER was initially designed for. It became clear that drastic change was needed, so a new version has been developed.

Over the last year a lot of Learning Technology Services’ blood, sweat and tears has gone into developing a new and improved version of FASER that is more scalable, more robust and paves the way for future developments.

With a bunch of coursework marking coming up, now might be a great time to look at ways FASER can make marking easier for you:

Annotate coursework online
No need to scribble on paper or carry loads of coursework around with you, you can login to FASER and edit coursework wherever you are. It’s just got better too – based on feedback from users, the system now uses an alternative supplier to provide improved online annotation.

See outstanding tasks
There are now calls to action in FASER to guide you towards common outstanding tasks relating to an assignment, reducing how long it takes you to get through your work.

Support for you to support disabled students
FASER now has increased visibility of and guidance about students with a Specific Learning Disability (SpLD) or Asperger Syndrome Disorder (ASD).

Improved performance
New technology behind the scenes has made FASER quicker and will enable even more performance improvements in the future.

Assignment overview dashboard

Assignment search and “at a glance”

Feedback assistant

Assignment overview details

If you would like a sneak peek of the new version, simply click on the blue banner when you next log in to FASER.

Training

Book onto one of our drop-in Lunch and Learn sessions running this term in Colchester: